Casting my mind back to the critical UX skills mind map I created, on a similar vein I created this table to begin to draw the lines between my experiences and skills necessary for a potential placement opportunity. I viewed the skills listed on a number of UX placement job listings and described if I have the skill or how I can acquire the skill.
| REQUIRED SKILLS | DO I POSSESS THIS SKILLS? | EVIDENCE OR ACTION? |
|---|---|---|
| Familiarity with design systems and skills | Yes | Using Figma and adobe creative cloud programmes throughout University. |
| Strong Communication Skills | Yes | In my professional experience as a professional wedding harpist, working and communicating with clients over a long period of time. |
| Growth Orientated | Yes | Professional experience in Hollister - leading a team and motivating myself to drive growth of business metrics. |
| Autonomous working with personal project management skills | Yes | Through my academic work and my application to harp studies etc. |
| Able to think through user needs and business goals and apply them to their designs | Yes | Through my user research and preparatory research for my university project ‘Balance’, taking a user-centric approach to my research and implementing them into my designs. |
| Able to understand and articulate interaction design principles and processes | Yes | Learning and researching UX principles through my lecture content in university. |
| Familiar with design critiques | Yes | These are frequent at university. |
| Familiar with sketch and Invision | No | I should try and implement these projects into some of my design work just to grow familiarity with them. |
| Detail oriented in creating annotated wireframes, documentation, and mockups | Yes | There is evidence of this in my portfolio. |
| Able to communicate clearly and pitch designs effectively | Yes | I feel I gain these skills through Brand Representative Lead at hollister by frequent handovers to management. I will continue to build upon these skills this year through design presentations. |
| Defend design decisions | Yes | My notion blog is where I practice this skill by explaining my design decisions. |
<aside> ⭐ REFLECTION: I really enjoyed this exercise, as it allowed me to truly reflect on my experiences in a streamlined and relevant way to the industry I am entering in to. I found it particularly helpful as a lot of my professional experience has been in different industries, such as retail or music. In the initial stages of planning my CV, I wondered how I would make those experiences relevant to such a contrasting field. However, through this exercise it really highlighted to me all of the transferrable skills I have gained.
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